Culturally Specific Causal Cognition
There are over seven billion people in this world that continue to occupy all corners of the earth and it is just recently, with the aid of technology, that they are fully able to connect with the vast variety of people, and explore other cultures with much ease. However, why is culture so important in shaping the way people interact with their surroundings? Why are humans so unique while so similar biologically? Psychologists are now able to answer those questions by conducting various studies. One of these studies is on causal cognition, by the way a person reacts to a given situation, which is, in turn, dependent on several variables. Prior to the recent research, it has always been believed that people’s …show more content…
The participants from each culture, regardless of the country of residence or of the language in which they participated, put forth results that were most similar to the results of other participants from the same meta-culture (Norenzayan & Nisbett, 2000). The participants that identified with the East Asian meta-culture of collectivism produced results that demonstrated the following in each of the three features of the study: in regard to the fundamental attribution error feature, the behavior of the target was due to situational and outside factors, independent of the target’s actual inclinations; in regards to the analytic versus holistic styles of cognition feature, the behavior of the object was attributed to the external factors that it interacts with; and in regards to the attention to field versus object feature, the field received most attention when identifying the object, thus bringing in the concept of field dependence in collectivism, which refers to the difficulty of separating the object from its context (Norenzayan & Nisbett, 2000). The participants that identified with the American or Western meta-cultures of individualism produced results that demonstrated the following in each of the three features of the study: in regard to the …show more content…
An interesting notion to ponder is the extent to which individualism or collectivism is ingrained into the cognition of an individual. For example, even though American admissions counselors strongly maintain that they are holistically reviewing every application, how much of their personal individualistic and analytic stance seeps into their cognition while making admissions
There are over seven billion people in this world that continue to occupy all corners of the earth and it is just recently, with the aid of technology, that they are fully able to connect with the vast variety of people, and explore other cultures with much ease. However, why is culture so important in shaping the way people interact with their surroundings? Why are humans so unique while so similar biologically? Psychologists are now able to answer those questions by conducting various studies. One of these studies is on causal cognition, by the way a person reacts to a given situation, which is, in turn, dependent on several variables. Prior to the recent research, it has always been believed that people’s …show more content…
The participants from each culture, regardless of the country of residence or of the language in which they participated, put forth results that were most similar to the results of other participants from the same meta-culture (Norenzayan & Nisbett, 2000). The participants that identified with the East Asian meta-culture of collectivism produced results that demonstrated the following in each of the three features of the study: in regard to the fundamental attribution error feature, the behavior of the target was due to situational and outside factors, independent of the target’s actual inclinations; in regards to the analytic versus holistic styles of cognition feature, the behavior of the object was attributed to the external factors that it interacts with; and in regards to the attention to field versus object feature, the field received most attention when identifying the object, thus bringing in the concept of field dependence in collectivism, which refers to the difficulty of separating the object from its context (Norenzayan & Nisbett, 2000). The participants that identified with the American or Western meta-cultures of individualism produced results that demonstrated the following in each of the three features of the study: in regard to the …show more content…
An interesting notion to ponder is the extent to which individualism or collectivism is ingrained into the cognition of an individual. For example, even though American admissions counselors strongly maintain that they are holistically reviewing every application, how much of their personal individualistic and analytic stance seeps into their cognition while making admissions